Detasseling
by Steve—Age 32—Lincoln, NE
At five o’clock in the morning, the corn is still cold and wet. Dew from the hairy leaves soaks your flannel and wrinkles your fingers. Firm as a handshake, you grab the tassel-tops and pull. The tassels pop and squeak. You drop them underfoot. These fields are virgin, a hundred percent pick, which means that every female stalk has a gold tassel. Twenty feet in, you’ve pulled sixty. With every step, your flannel gets heavier and wetter, and the black mud sucks hard at your feet. Far ahead, you can see the end: your row opening to a wide field lane and a glimmering expanse of soybeans, and beyond that a county road tapering off to the horizon, paralleled by crooked telephone poles and their long drooping wires. And even though it’s cold and you’re soaked, you’re glad to be out here, away from home, working. Every once and a while, you stop a moment to listen to the sound a busload of you make wading through the corn, the almost wind-like brush and scuttle of the leaves raking over your flannels. It’s almost soothing. But later, after lunch, the field is a different country. It takes willpower to propel yourself ahead: your legs, which moved easily enough all morning, suddenly feel heavy and dull, lethargic; blisters spill their brine into your socks; if you think anything, your thoughts are like the sky, too shapeless and empty, too distant to touch. Afternoons, you work like a machine. Hands chafed, skin slashed at by sharp leaves, the sun a hot bulb on your neck: nothing matters but the next step, and the next. You start to feel like you were born and will die taking these steps. Then somehow, in the throes of this resignation, the shift ends. You inch out of the field with the other boys, dirt-faced and ecstatic, voyageurs, all of you. You climb onto the bus, close your eyes and sleep. Having made some forty dollars.
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